Trending News: This Bionic Hand Is Real And It Can Make People Feel Touch Again

Why Is This Important?

Long Story Short

DARPA has created a prosthetic hand that’s not only controlled by the brain, but gives feedback so that the user can “feel” when it’s being touched.

Long Story

We like to joke about how men don’t have feelings, or have to be “taught how to feel,” but it’s not so funny when someone actually can’t physically feel things. For instance, someone paralyzed by a spinal injury, who literally cannot feel anything. That was the story for one unnamed 28 year old, until DARPA, the military’s team of mad scientists, stepped in. They were able to build him a bionic hand that he not only controls with his brain, but also tells him when it’s being touched.

“We’ve completed the circuit,” said DARPA program manager Justin Sanchez. “Prosthetic limbs that can be controlled by thoughts are showing great promise, but without feedback from signals traveling back to the brain it can be difficult to achieve the level of control needed to perform precise movements. By wiring a sense of touch from a mechanical hand directly into the brain, this work shows the potential for seamless bio-technological restoration of near-natural function.”

When they say they wired it directly to his brain, that’s not an exaggeration. Wires were run between the hand and the sensory cortex (the area responsible for tactile sensations), as well as the motor cortex (the area responsible for motion). When blindfolded, the volunteer was able to identify which finger was being touched with nearly 100% accuracy. In one instance, the researchers even tried to fool him. The device was accurate enough for the volunteer to identify their trickery.

“At one point, instead of pressing one finger, the team decided to press two without telling him,” said Sanchez, who oversees the Revolutionizing Prosthetics program. “He responded in jest asking whether somebody was trying to play a trick on him. That is when we knew that the feelings he was perceiving through the robotic hand were near-natural.”

Prosthetics have come a long way, but if we’re now able to create limbs that can feel as though they were natural, we may have reached the peak in terms of what’s possible. Maybe Luke’s bionic hand from Star Wars isn’t so far off after all.

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How much does something like this cost?

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I like my hands the way they are, but if I lost one I’d want one of these.

Drop This Fact

The oldest-known prosthesis in the world is about 3,000 years old and was found on an Egyptian mummy. She had a fake toe.

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